The purpose of time-keeping is to facilitate economic coordination, and year-round DST better suits the modern economy.
President-elect Donald Trump’s latest promise is to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which would mean putting the US on Standard Time year-round. Billionaire DOGE bosses Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, meanwhile, seem to want to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. Is this just a miscommunication? Or is the incoming administration as divided on this issue as the rest of America?
Regardless, we all must take a stand. Here is mine: Daylight Saving Time is superior to Standard Time, and it should be adopted year-round.
The purpose of time-keeping is to facilitate economic coordination, and DST better suits our modern economy. If the goal were simply to maximize sleep and physical well-being, we’d all be on our own solar time — with the sun directly overhead at noon. But that would be chaos. If the goal were simply to maximize economic coordination, we’d have just one (or maybe two) time zones. But that would be especially hard on people living near the borders.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.